SHE ofmindandbody

7 February – 31 March 2023

This SHE-zine is dedicated to all Women. We particularly acknowledge our First Nations women from the Bunurong People and women from our immigrant, and refugee communities. All of whom are significant to the City of Greater Dandenong.

SHE ofmindandbody celebrates all women and honours their stories.

SHE of mind and body is exhibited on the lands of the Bunurong People. We acknowledge and pay respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. We recognise and respect their continuing connections to climate, Culture and Country.

The She exhibitions, held annually at the Walker Street Gallery since 1997,1 cross a wide landscape of changing attitudes and eras in feminist art in Australia and globally. Behind the She exhibition stand important histories of both artmaking and the sensemaking around art. At the micro level of the event itself, She longevity as a repeated fixture featuring women artists has few parallels in Australian public artspaces’ yearly programmes. Numerous initiatives since the 1970s have foregrounded and nurtured women’s art making in Australia,2 but most were shortlived as mainstream artistic enthusiasm for women’s art ebbed and flowed across the decades in line with cultural and intellectual fashions. In the 1990s when She launched, direct expressions of feminists were somewhat outlying cultural practices. At art school students pursuing feminist influences did so independent of tutors and lecturers, often in clusters of like minded friends.

Feminism found a congenial home at the Walker Street Gallery. The She project began as porous and democratic, with an open call to women artists.3 This impetus was practical as much as ideological. Prizes for exhibitors included slots for solo exhibitions at other public artspaces on Melbourne’s outer fringes, including the Frankston Art Centre, Burrinja Cultural Centre and in Berwick.4, tangibly acknowledging the often-ignored periurban art cultures. Alongside She, the Walker Street Community Art Centre organised symposia discussing issues facing women entering the art world. She also filled a space in Melbourne left empty with the closure of the Women’s Gallery in 1995 and its cycle of International Women’s Day exhibitions co-curated with the Women’s Art Register since 1990. Following a curatorial decision in 2016, from 2017 She was no longer a self-nominated call for artists without dealer representation, but an invitational showcase of noteworthy women exhibitors from Melbourne art schools’ graduate shows. In effect the changed structure documented the revised intellectual currency of feminism from the later 2000s.5

1 The Walker Street Gallery’s published 1999 calendar in the State Library of Victoria artists files claims that She – The Cat’s Mother was the 4th She exhibition suggesting a 1996 starting date – or it could be a typo for the 3rd. An internal document in the gallery’s files suggests that 1997 was the first She exhibition

2 Louise R Mayhew “Forty years and counting” Art Monthly Australia 286 Summer 2015/2016, 33-40. Only two groups have survived into the present from the white heat of 1970s feminist activism: the Sydney Print Circle founded in 1970 and the Women’s Art Register founded in 1975 and based in Melbourne but collecting and collating documentation of women’s art nationally. From the 1970s to the 2000’s dwindling financial and institutional support condemned many feminist initiatives in Australia to often wither after impressive launches

3 Browsing through ephemera relating to the Walker Street Gallery suggests that open calls were a favoured modality to enable accessibility and diversity in a number of its projects. From several hundred submissions thirty or forty were selected for the She exhibitions.

Each year offers a new theme and or subtitle – from the iconic She the Cat’s Mother, 1999 to the new age She – the Spirit of Life, 2003. In 2023, the theme SHE of mind and body binds highly diverse practices and materialities. All the works and artists speak to the theme of women’s identity and experience, either at the physical level of actual bodies from Ema Shin’s meticulously crafted body parts that invoke awe for the handwork and a sense of preciousness and reverence, or Neroli Henderson and Vonda Keji’s use of photography on textile substrate to reclaim the representation of women from the ubiquity of slur and stereotype to Dan Bain’s raw, unflinching tally of women killed from ‘male’ violence in Australia. Other works reflect the curatorial theme in a more allusive consideration of the nature of acculturated female experience set within a dynamic of community, either of cultural origins and practices or in terms of intangibles of structures, linkages and processes such as Caroline Phillips and Kate V M Sylvester

Textiles highlight multiple nodes of connection to feminist practice, as this medium became a core referent for feminist art in the 1970s. The highly influential and - unusually for a feminist text – much reprinted Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch repositioned female craftwork, its techniques and inheritances, and redirected them to contemporary and political ends. Textile work, both as process and object, recorded female agency that was missing from traditional written and paper-based repositories of public life. Parker’s jamming of traditional hierarchies is exemplified by Anna Farago, Neroli Henderson and Ema Shin, who start with traditional techniques, but deploy them with intellectually and politically expanded meanings. Revisiting Parker’s theories synergises with the current decentring of a transatlantic London-Paris-New York axis of [white, male] authority as default.

4 Browsing through ephemera relating to the Walker Street Gallery suggests that open calls were a favoured modality to enable accessibility and diversity in a number of its projects. From several hundred submissions thirty or forty were selected for the She exhibitions.

5 This exhibition follows a different template, presenting a curated selection of artists, many of whom have had national and international level exposure as well as profesional artists from Dandenong and surrounding suburbs

6 Rozsika Parker The subversive stitch : embroidery and the making of the feminine London: Women’s Press 1984, the book was reprinted several times in the 1980s, updated by the author and republished with new material including discussions of Tracey Emmen and Louise Bourgeois in 1996, and reprinted after Parker’s death in 2010 and again 2019, an unusually number of reprints for a radical feminist book. It is also seen as a pivotal text for the rise of craftivism, and Joseph McBinn has recently published Queering the Subversive Stitch, London: Bloomsbury 2021 which applies Parker’s mix of craft and social histories to the complex story of male textile practice and how men have subverted the constricting stereotypes of modern masculinity through textiles.

Nusra Latif Qureshi’s practice and her collaboration with Anna Farago offers a timely reminder that many cultures, media and artforms are informed by histories and paradigms that are as complex and extensive as Western art metanarratives. These much-repeated first world stories often ignore Indigenous People and voices: an aspect countered by Blackgin (Georgia MacGuire)’s presence and work.

Other She artists reference a more conceptual, intellectual use of textiles drawn from abstraction and mid [20th] century questioning of conventional boundaries of material and format of sculpture and artworks. Textiles challenged the physically hard sculptural norms of metal and stone. Sculptors Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois often favoured temporary, fragile, fugitive constructions and used textiles without the overtones of museological revivals. Caroline Phillips, perhaps, most directly references this feminist genealogy in She. Her use of cast offs and repurposing foregrounds late capitalism’s promiscuous waste of resources and adds a social undertone to works that lack slogans or analog referents. Forms and surfaces infer bodies and metaphors of the feminine and often depict connections, links and multiplicity to imply community and the relational. Kate V M Sylvester likewise questions materiality and consumption via redeployment. She draws a transfigurative aesthetic merit from the previously discarded and dismissed, whilst invoking the ghosts and detritus of both prior use and users, yet also capturing traces of intensive delicate handwork.

Chaco Kato presents another major tranche of contemporary textile practice that deploys textiles architecturally to create structures that capture and inform space, provoking questions about spatial inhabitation and organisation. The expanded public scale of her works also interrogate the preconception that textiles (and thus women makers) are demure, private and essentially introspective, positioned outside public culture. Concurrently, Vonda Keji reminds the audience that textiles as a medium of commentary, reaction and expression, via dress and accessorising, have always been scaled to and sited on the body as a public projection.

Feminism and textiles are both often assumed to be delimited by certain boundaries, disciplinary expectations and contexts, yet here they resonate across multiple practices and catchments. The controversies and intense emotions and reactions that Dan Bain’s Lost Petition generates, reminds all attending SHE of mind and body that feminism is not irrelevant, has not passed its use-by date or achieved its goals in a world of teal candidates jamming conservative Australian electorates, or women of colour attaining high executive positions in the US government. Feminism remains entirely necessary whilst constantly questioned and rejected in public cultural domains.

The She exhibition returns to the Walker Street Gallery after three years of disruptions. Viewers of the exhibition ought not to take the public presence of either gallery spaces or artworks for granted. Let us acknowledge the dedication and tenacity of the Walker Street Gallery staff and their municipal supporters, and equally the artists for continuing in the long legacy of She exhibitions and allowing them to live for its audiences. SHE of mind and body.

Juliette Peers

Art and design historian, writer, curator, teacher and committed feminist.